In trying to make my team aware of what’s in our team’s wiki (based on Mediawiki), I wanted a simple notification to go out to the team daily listing the new wiki pages created on the previous day. This may be achieved with a simple shell script that queries the Mediawiki recentchanges table.

STEP 1: Deploy Shell Script

The following script queries the recentchanges table and fetches data for pages created (rc_type = 1) the previous day in the Main namespace (rc_namespace = 0).

NOTE: (1) You must change certain variables and the body of the email as per your requirements. (2) If your wiki isn’t updated with new pages very often, you may send this notification weekly. To do so, simply replace “yesterday” by “last week” on lines 11 and 12 and replace “where rc_timestamp like ‘$REPORT_DATE%'” by “where rc_timestamp > $REPORT_DATE0000”

STEP 2: Cron the Shell Script

Set up a cron job to send a daily notification. The example below executes the script daily at 9 AM.